How to delegate
Learning how to delegate is one of the first tasks for any new manager. While delegation is an important leadership skill, the psychology of delegation is challenging for many people. Here are some of the most common reasons for delegation failures and suggested solutions.
You prefer the individual contributor role.
When a new manager first delegates, they may realize that they are now giving away their favorite part of their job. Not everyone finds management to be fulfilling. This disconnect happens frequently in creative and technical professions where the individual contributor role focuses more directly on doing the work for clients or creating the products to be sold.
Once you are past the initial discomfort that is common after a change of role, if you still find that you feel worse about your job satisfaction after moving into management, reevaluate if management is the best fit for you. If you prefer to return to an individual contributor role, find out if your organization would support you in moving back to one.
You don’t yet have experience trusting anyone to be reliable.
Before you try to delegate tasks that are mission critical to the success of your job, ask yourself whether you have ever had any life experience where you trusted someone with something important and they came through for you. If this hasn’t yet happened for you, it is going to be very difficult to give up control in a work setting.
Extend grace to yourself and start with small, less important tasks. Get support from a therapist or coach to manage any anxiety that you feel. Don’t be afraid to say to direct reports, “My style is that I will be more involved with your work in the beginning and then as we get better at working together, I’ll be involved less.”
Also, ensure you are hiring the right people. It is easier to delegate to specialists for tasks within their competence than to hire generalists and then hope their learning curve isn’t too long.
You’re a perfectionist.
If you’re a perfectionist (think Type 1 on the Enneagram), delegation is likely going to be painful for you because you have very clear ideas about how everything should be done and it can spark anxiety for you to see things completed differently.
It will take time and practice to accept that there are multiple ways for tasks to be completed that are “good enough.” As long as your boss, the leadership of your employer, customers/clients and investors are happy with any deliverables completed by your team, that’s a success.
You haven’t yet accepted that you cannot do it all.
Finally, if you are still harboring illusions that you alone can accomplish all the work because it feels easier and faster to do it all yourself, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to endure the pain of learning how to delegate. Many people feel this way until exhaustion and burnout overwhelm them.
A refresher on delegation.
Once you work through psychological barriers to delegation, it becomes easier to follow the steps of effective delegation.
– Be very clear about the tasks you are delegating, the timeframe to do them, and how you will evaluate metrics for success.
– Don’t wait until the final deadline to check in with the person doing the task. Set up milestones where you can assess whether the project is being done correctly and you can help to fix anything that is potentially derailing.
– Use a checklist. Here’s one example of a checklist for delegation tasks.
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I first published this article on 2019-03-30 at VocationVillage.com. I updated this version.
